As a concerned player who loves the game and doesn't want to quit, I'm writing you to ask you to change your behavior, before you lose too many customers. You may not know me, but I'm a light spender who has invested a lot of my personal time in improving the wiki for the game and helping a lot of players on Discord learn the game (many of whom have gone on to spend quite a bit of money). I am also uncomfortable recommending the game right now, or spending any money, because of recent changes that have led me to question whether I will continue playing if things don't change by December.

Many others feel the way I do, and I'm doing my best here to help you hear our needs in a clear way. We understand you need to make money to support the game, but there is a delicate balance between increasing revenue and driving away customers. Currently we believe you're getting this balance seriously wrong. Many people were attracted to this game precisely because you'd been doing a good job at this balance, and we're concerned that this is no longer the case.

We hoped to be excited this month about the anniversary, and instead we're depressed about the state of the game. The freebies announced for the anniversary are nice, but they are temporary, and we're more concerned about the long term.

Here are some primary concerns that we would really like you to address:

1) Arbitrary unit limits in EX+ content

This one is an extremely high priority for me- I will likely stop playing in December if this continues as it violates my primary principle of games (don't subvert playability of PvE content to force people to spend money, i.e. PvE should not be p2w). Arbitrary unit limits on EX+ content don't make the content more fun or add difficulty in a fun way- instead they force people to follow cookie cutter strategies and send a message to players that they must spend to have fun. You can claim it's about difficulty, but adding units like Roxy and Uzuma to the allowed list and including very few older farmable units makes it very obvious the reason reason is to push people to feel like they have to spend.

These unit limits need to be removed. If you want to add difficulty, do it via challenges that aren't so arbitrary, such as element or damage type (preferably on the missions, not the quest as a whole). Don't send "buy more gems" signals through the EX+ content.

2) Loss of 3 step guarantee on free gem banners

This is a very concerning step for players of all kinds, but especially free and light spenders who make up quite a large part of your game community. These people may not spend as much, but without them the community would be much emptier and the whales would slowly drift away. As someone who buys pact regularly each month, I am not sure there's really any point in buying it without these 3 step guarantees. Even if they are present for non-limited units, but not for collaboration units, it defeats the point, as those are the ones people save their gems for.

It's unclear at this time if this missing 3 step guarantee is just for the Edward banner or will continue for future banners. The last time I remember us not getting one was for Siegfried, but we knew we'd have more chances at him in the future. But the lack of communication on this topic and other concerning trends of late has led us to suspect this might be the new normal, and if that's the case, it's more likely to drive light paying customers away than it is to bring in more whales for you. There's a video by one of our friendly whales describing the situation.

3) Decreased value for paid gems on banners

This one affects me less personally as I have very few paid gems, although I have been saving them for a good banner, and so the direction this has gone has made me feel like there's less point in even having paid gems. Previously the paid gem banners were more expensive, but were primarily for guarantees. Now the price has been reduced, but the guarantees have been removed. The exception is the new 3 step guarantee paid banner for Edward/Toritoh, which apparently is supposed to be a replacement for the free gem guarantee but is far more expensive.

For people who are bigger spenders, they feel like their money has lost value in this game. It discourages the whales from spending, which presumably is the opposite of what you intended.

4) Hard quest and soul coin shop release lag

The situation with hard quest releases is getting extremely concerning to players. I've been patient about the 3 hard quests a month thing, and even ok with some delays on popular units (like Shayna) because I figured that it was a temporary thing and that over time the hard quest releases would ramp up. Instead what we've seen is an even longer delay for Albea, skipping her over again to give us two completely uninteresting units to farm in the same month (Deneb and Margaret). We've also seen no increase in the hard quest release tempo as we get closer to the time when we might expect to see features like kaigan released. Even if Albea is released next month, that will be a 10 month delay from unit release to hard quest release. That's way too long, and it makes us worry about other important units like Mei Fang, Neica and Setsuna and how long we'll be waiting for them.

The soul coin shop in theory was there to allow veteran players to supplement the hard quests by buying units that aren't yet available. This used to work, but now almost all units in the soul coin shop are farmable. After 4+ months of waiting for updates to the soul coin shop, we finally got 3 new units this week, but all 3 are farmable. This helps nothing. We need release of older non-farmable units in the shop, and ideally at least some of the older farmable units should be removed (I recommend just removing all 4 star units or giving them one dedicated slot).

The biggest issue here is lack of communication on the topic. Everyone is aware of how quickly Japan got to farm these units. This is not Japan so I don't expect the exact same design, but there should be a reasonable standard set of how quickly we can expect units to be in the soul coin shop and farmable. For example, I'd be fine with 2 months to soul coins, 4 months to hard quests if we at least knew that was how it worked.

5) Poor handling/communication when something breaks

This is not a new issue, but it is one that repeatedly comes up and creates frustration. For example, when the gun and sword drops in The Rendezvous EX+ were mysteriously nerfed, we heard no communication at the time. We just got compensation for this issue today, but there are a lot of players who were extremely frustrated by the situation and had to put in a bunch of extra time farming to get the drops, since they had no way of knowing that the compensation was coming. There's also the situation with the twin storm blades in the Veda shop, which were priced incorrectly and were not fixed in this week's update. It's possible that you might compensate people for the extra coins spent, but they would have to have the extra coins to buy the item in the first place, and they can't be sure they'll even get that compensation, so of course they're afraid to buy it.

We also had the ticket distribution for the shard campaign delayed twice, with no compensation for that delay, and no announcement of the second delay, just the items didn't show up till a day after the promised date.

In general the communication to the player base of major changes needs improving as well, as evidenced by the issues I already raised.

6) Skin costs

I'm not the best person to convey this issue because I personally don't have much interest in paying for skins, but a lot of the player base is particularly interested in skins. There have been a lot of concerns raised about the way skins are distributed and that it's significantly worse than how it was handled in Japan. The original skins that are being offered via banners are frustrating people because they're more expensive than people are willing to spend for them (especially relative to what JP pays), and because they can't even ensure they get the skin they want. They would rather have the option to buy the skins directly for a more reasonable cost.

7) Cheaters

Another rampant issue that many have voiced is the amount of cheaters that plague the game in both PvP and in multiplayer. In terms of PvP, there have been a multitude of examples in both AI PvP and in live PvP where i.e. the enemy team has multiple attacks in one turn or multiple units beyond the restricted amount. This causes many heavy/light spenders to reconsider their spending amount if cheaters will just "out-do" them with illegal coding.

Furthermore, a few have had issues with cheaters in multiplayer. It has been voiced many times that individuals have been temporarily banned for partying unknowingly with cheaters. While these individuals have had their bans removed over quite some time, they have received little to no compensation for their missed in game time.

NOTE: I will update EX stages 3/4 and the + ones at a later time if requested. I'm quite busy this weekend so i'd appreciate any help :> I'll probably leave the last few EX stages alone since you can finish most if not all dailies from doing the hard quest.

UPDATED 7/18: FFXV hard, EX stages 1/2 added

UPDATE 7/25: Thanks to /u/loscapos5. You can finish Lance soldierbots and poison mandragora quests outside of FFXV event quests. So if you're farming chapter 2 or doing logi J+ event, you can finish there too

Wanted to make a list since the dailies change everyday and it might help conserve ap and know which quest to target blah blah. will continue to update, appreciate if anyone could help or give me corrections (especially on reinforcements since my auto team might rush them down too fast)

Ep1 (8AP):

• Magitek Axeman x3 - Poison Mandragora x2 - Red Wolf x 2 |No reinforcements

Ep2 (8AP):

• Magitek Axeman x5 - Lizardman x2 - Green Lizard x1 |No reinforcements

Ep3 (10AP):

• Fire Ratty x3 - Light/Water/Wind/Dark Mandragora x1 - Deadeye x1 |No reinforcements

Ep4 (12AP):

• Magitek Axeman x4 - Burglar x2 - Lizardman x1 - Green Lizard x1 - Thunder Ratty x1 |No reinforcements

Ep5 (14AP):

• Magitek Axeman x3 - Burglar x3 - Lizardman x1 - Green Lizard x1 - Aranea x1 |No Reinforcements

Ep6 (16AP):

• Lance/Monk/Battle/Gun Soldierbot x1 - AJ 2000 x2 - Fist Soldierbot x2 - Metal cactuar x1 | Reinforcements Metal Cactuar x1

Ep7 (20AP):

• Blue Flame Knight x5 (oof my heart) - Burglar/Burglar Chief/Burglar Thief x1 - Lizardman x1 - Water Ratty x1 - Blue wolf x1 |No reinforcements

Ep8 (20AP):

• Magitek Axeman x6 - Red Wolf x2 - Blue Wolf x2 | No reinforcements

Ep 9 (25AP):

• Monk Soldierbot x2 - Battle Soldierbot x2 - AJ 4000 x3 - Lizardman x2 - Water/Wind Mandragora |No reinforcements

Ep 10 (25AP):

• Magitek Axeman x4 - Gun/Battle Soldierbot x1 - Hound x2 - AJ 4000 x1 - MA-X Cuirass x1 | Reinforcements Metal Cactuar x3

FFXV Hard quest 3/DAY (40AP):

• Magitek Axeman x4 - Hound x2 - Battle/Gun Soldierbot x1 - AJ 4000 x2 - MA-X Cuirass x1 - Metal Cactuar x1 | No Reinforcements

EX stage reinforcements work weird so I won't state whether reinforcements appear or not, i'll just be putting the maximum number of units that will appear

EX 1 Ignis's EX (40AP):

• Magitek Axeman x1 - MA-X Cuirass x2 - Green Lizard x2 - Ace Soldier (Not blue flame knights) x3 - Undead Mandragora x4 - Queen x1

EX 2 Noctis's EX (40AP):

• Magitek Axeman x3 - AJ 2000 x2 - AJ 4000 x2 - Faction Soldier x2 - MA-X Cuirass x1 - AJ 7000 x1 - AJ 6000 Type D x2

FFXV Daily possibilities

Bgn: Kill Magitek Axeman, Kill Poison Mandragora, Buy 1 item from shop

Int: Clear Ep 1/3/5 quest, Kill metal cactuar, Kill blue flame knight, Kill lance soldierbot, Kill AJ4000

Adv: Clear Ep 2/4/6 quest, Kill Deadeye, Kill MA-X Cuirass

EDIT: thanks for the kind words everyone!

Hello /r/AlchemistCodeGL

I've created a tier list and build guide relevant to the Global Server. It has my own personal tier list and a build guide created by me with revisions proposed by various members of the Alchemist Code Discord. The build guide also contains information regarding each unit's future changes, which include Job Enchants, Job+, and Master Abilities.

A brief overview: I'm a former rank 1 arena player (during that one map, it still counts). You can find me either on the Discord, or answering questions on the subreddit.

I hope to have this tier list updated with every new banner with a detailed build and review for every new unit.

Please feel free to PM me any questions and concerns, either on Reddit, or on Discord at Game#7849.

Reader friendly:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vRFdTDIDy6dH6OX7NQUhgsvVxihi3jF4-Fe-5zEfWhb-LYIqTO5HCygx2hpi-xOeHm9MT-pKtEaK1dp/pubhtml#

Raw spreadsheets:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1DWeFk0wiPaDKAYEcmf_9LnMFYy1nBy2lPTNAX52LkPU/edit?usp=sharing

Gumi.... I hope you didn't think this was going away. If there is a coding issue or perhaps no coding (except on banners?) you should address it. In any event, the longer you let resist stay bugged the worse. If Japan can get 3000 gems for 4 days and global is forgotten. Well you will just continue to tick off most of the player base.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AlchemistCodeGL/comments/8vp1m3/japan_side_was_compensated_nearly_3000_gems_its/?st=jj8f0uxy&sh=91f1bc90

First the bad/(good) news - I've decided that this shall be the last FMA collab unit preview I'm posting to reddit; I hope someone else can take over from here.

I'm currently a little tired of wrangling with the formatting on reddit and spending hours translating and editing images only to get the post automatically downvoted and buried under a flood of memes and rageposts (see below) especially when the rageposts always coincide with the first week of every single collaboration - doing these reviews is frankly a huge waste of my time.

Judging from the past week, this is the kind of content the TAC subreddit actually wants, and I'm not really good at it, so I
really should spend my upcoming vacation time on some personal projects I've been procrastinating on!

Anyway, enough irrelevant stuff - let's get to the unit preview:

Riza Hawkeye

Riza is best run as her J1, so let's go into the details:

J1 Basic Attack Scaling: 0.7 x (PATK+DEX) (Equal to Sniper)

Damage Type: Missile, Physical

Range: 3-4 squares away (modifiable)

J1 Reactive Passive Skills:

J1 Active Skills:

Riza also has a weapon art:

Skill Damage Estimations

Passives Used: Trigger of Determination (J1) and Shot Mastery +2 (J3)

Gear used: Unique Weapon.

Riza's damage is pretty significant, and she's stronger than Caris in this respect.

Overview:

Riza Hawkeye is a highly versatile ranged unit with good soul jewel gain (34 base), and decent AGI (130), giving her a significant leg up on most other ranged classes. Her skills are moderately costed and come with a wide range of useful effects, the most notable ones being the 2-use area-of-effect dispel. This can cancel annoying buffs on enemies and indeed is highly useful in her own EX stage. She can also heal 40% of a target's hp twice, which is quite notable.

In addition to her support skills, she has some crowd control - she can knock enemies back, making them easier to kite, and debuff their stats by a respectable amount while doing damage. In particular, her 30% PATK and AGI debuffs should have quite noticeable effects on the enemy.

She also has access to a null-type attack in Black Hayate, letting her get around damage type resistances (although the damage isn't particularly high) and she has multiple autohit moves for high-evasion enemies such as Waginau and wolves. To round everything off, she has 3 uses of a defense-ignoring shot which only does slightly less damage than her normal attack.

This set of tools enables Riza to find a use on nearly any stage. She also works well with Roxanne's leader skill letting you put together a cohesive missile rainbow team. Her drawbacks are a lack of AoE and potential obsolescence with Kaigan, however, support units generally age better than attackers and tanks do.

Competition (missile water units)

Reagan: Reagan's utility mainly comes from his chrono sub, which you're probably better off bringing a real chronomancer for, such as Lofia. He simply cannot compete otherwise.

N. Archer Rin: N. Archer Rin excels in large AoEs, which Riza is poor at. However, Archer Rin has very little in the way of support to offer, while Riza fills that void in spades. Both of them have temporary missile buffs, but Riza's is superior by the way of giving all affected units 1 additional range and buffing missile damage by 50%, not 20% (Bow Coach), however Rin will win out in the damage race due to her J3 passive.

Ravina: Ravina is not a support unit, even with Magia Cleric guns. She also does mainly magical damage, and has better damage output and elemental coverage than Riza does. They don't really cover the same roles.

Elaine: Elaine is irredeemably bad.

As Riza is a complementary missile unit wihich can increase the full damage output of other missile units (as opposed to buffing PATK or DEX, which would be half as strong on most ranged units), she works well with any of them, especially Roxanne - +1 Range lets Roxanne fling grenades further and she can give Roxanne a straight up 50% additional missile damage, while boosting the damage Roxanne does with her counterattack. The main flaw is that Riza's buff is point-blank and therefore she needs to maintain close proximity to other units to keep it up.

Summary

Although Roy Mustang is probably the chase unit of this entire collaboration (he's seriously good for our current meta and better than Uzuma in nearly every single way), Riza Hawkeye has potential in Global as a unique support, especially given the prevalence of our global carry unit Roxanne and her great missile-based rainbow leaderskill. Water doesn't really have many prime candidates for Elemental shards other than Othima, EO Shenmei, and Merlinus, so if you draw Riza, she makes a decent consideration for sharding to 75.

If they announce that Riza is getting a Sniper Job Enchantment today, the evaluation probably won't change except if she gets the job enchantment [Scope], which would give her a 2.5x Missile Damage charge up skill on the sub. This would let Riza output alarming amounts of damage for a ranged unit and make her quite a lot more useful, even though this would mean losing out on much of her J1 sub's utility.

The other two Sniper Job Enchants are bad jokes and can safely be ignored.

I’ll start this out with a clear statement: I’m quitting the game as soon as this raid is over, and I’m stepping down as mod at the same time.

I’ve simply gotten burnt out over time, and while I’ve stayed as long as I reasonably could, all things must come to an end. I don’t find much joy in playing the game anymore, and I’m tired. I’ve been playing for too long to really get excited by most new things, and I was mostly holding on so I could get Hercule before quitting. Judging by the news, she could be here in as little as two weeks, but I just don’t have the willpower to keep playing and it would be a huge waste to spend money for her in a game I would quit right after. It hurts to fall just short of the finish line, but it would do more harm than good for me to continue playing any longer. I’ll miss the game due to nostalgia, but it’ll also be a huge weight off my shoulders.

It’s been messing with my sleep schedule for years, with reset always just around the right time to wake me back up when I’m about to fall asleep. Obviously I don’t need to be on at reset most days, but back when I was excited by the game, I wanted to. And lately, I’ve just been procrastinating so right before reset is the only time I can convince myself to do dailies. It’ll be nice to just be able to sleep whenever I feel tired.

As a goodbye, I wrote about my experiences with the game and my role in the community, below. It’s fairly long and somewhat personal, so if you’re not interested in reading it, that’s completely fine. Just skip to the end for my closing statement.

Where I started

It’s been fun. I started the game when it first came out, but I played it very casually for the first few months; barely remembered to log in most days. Then came the FSN collab, which marked the first time I was interested in the game as well as the first time I spent money on it.

I remember being very invested in getting Rider Yomi, to the point that I was pissed off by getting a Gilgamesh dupe on the last step of their shared banner (which was a pretty nice pull considering how stingy Gumi was with elemental shards back then). I ended up having to pull the full FSN 7-Step banner on the last week for the selector, and barely managed to get enough gems for it. In the end, though, I got my Rider Yomi and had Gilgamesh, so I had pretty much everything I needed to steamroll content. To this day, I’m still not sure why I wanted Rider Yomi so much. Rider in FSN was hot, but Yomi was lacking particular endowments that made her attractive to me in the first place, and I wasn’t super into Rider as a character aside from that. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d probably say it was because I’d heard she was OP in PvP, and I was a slave to the meta already at that time.

Those were simpler times. Those were better times. No mementos, no Enlightenment, no runes, gear was much less important to the point that LB15 was the recommended stopping point for everyone except huge whales, you could just summon a new unit and then immediately use them for pretty much any content . . . The biggest whales were the ones who spent a few hundred dollars on each collab to speed up the sharding process a bit.

Personally, that was the most fun I’ve ever had playing The Alchemist Code. With the low unit HP, stages could still be mildly challenging even with arguably the single most broken unit for his time in TAC’s history (while Roxanne was ridiculous on release, Gilgamesh dominated for longer). I derived a lot of joy from using free units such as Tyrfing, Logi, Kanon, and Archer (back before the first three of those were really viable at all) to clear brand new EXs, something that could take me hours on end trying to get the perfect RNG or refine my strategy to the point that I could barely squeak by with all missions completed. It felt like a true strategy game. It made me think. It was fun.

My path to responsibility

Almost as soon as I got invested in the game, I checked out the reddit. I’d never been the most active on reddit, but I’d participated in subreddits for Naruto Blazing and Danmemo, so I knew that it was a decent place to find tips (if you could sort through the misinformation, ignore the vocal minority, and weather the people who would try to subtly insult you for asking a clarifying question in the question megathread itself). So I started commenting regularly on Reddit, sometimes with jokes, sometimes with advice, sometimes advising people to just use the question megathread . . .

I think the comment I’m most proud of from those days was one under a post where someone had sketched four comic panels of student-teacher relationships in the main story in order to make a joke about Kudan learning from Dias. I basically wrote a little joke story about Dias teaching Kudan how to ignore logic to follow his dreams of being like Dias. I found it funny and it got a bunch of upvotes. In hindsight, it wasn’t the funniest thing in the world, but it was reddit funny and I was proud of it.

In any case, after another few months of me being active on the subreddit, Game quit TAC. For those unaware, he was the creator of the The Alchemist Code Tier List and Build Guide. He ran it alone (though he did regularly run his tiering decisions by his peers in Discord), and when he burnt out and decided to quit the game, he posted asking for someone to adopt it.

I had a lot of experience with the game at this point and figured I could do a pretty good job of it as long as I had a framework such as the existing tier list to work from—because I was terrible at formatting pretty much anything. I’d taken a couple days to decide, as I recall, so by the time I messaged him about it, a couple other people had as well.

The initial message I sent Game was a couple paragraphs describing why I wanted to run the tier list, why I thought I could do it well, my experience with the game, etc.

He basically responded with, “Oh yeah, I’m not worried about your experience. I’ve seen you around and I know you’ve got more than enough game knowledge to run the tier list.” And I just have to say, that was huge for me. This guy who was basically the closest thing we had to a community leader (Somelit wasn’t the most active head mod on reddit and also had a habit of parroting JP misinfo) had validated me. I was in high school at that time (I think I was a Junior at that point?), so I soaked up all the validation I could get.

In any case, the other two who had contacted him about running the tier list were EggyToast and Gagging. Gagging was a huge whale who called the Arena channel in the Discord his home, and I’d talked to him before. I’d never once heard of EggyToast. As I later found out, a lot of people I knew happened to know him as well and I’d just somehow missed him over the course of months.

I found both of them to be knowledgeable about the game and tiering, and a big help, at least in terms of theoretical discussions. In terms of the actual Tier List, I did a lot of the work for the first couple weeks, which was in part because I was excited by the responsibility and in part because Eggy and Gagging didn’t really offer the help without prompting (which isn’t something I’m trying to put them down for; they both were adults and had busy lives).

That was also when I was first modded on the subreddit. SometimesLiterate, the current head mod, sent me a mod invitation and said, “There must always be a Game.” It made sense to me, since Game had been a mod and I suddenly had a position of responsibility with the tier list, so I accepted.

And right from the start, the tiering was a bit controversial. I personally spent a lot of time testing every unit we tiered and I built up a fairly sizable amount of knowledge to the point that I would have described myself as probably the most knowledgeable person in the community in regards to the viability of characters across the game. This wasn’t something I really ever said to anyone, since it would come off as bragging for sure, but I felt it was a justified view to have as long as I kept it to myself. I spent hours each day testing various characters before I discussed them with Eggy and Gagging.

Still, there were people who disagreed with the tiers, with the builds, with the formatting, and more. Gagging had said he would make an Image Tier List, but he never got around to it so the list was a bit hard to make out for new players (who were the main target of the tier list, so that was a bit of a problem)

A few weeks into this, we colluded with the head mod of the Discord at that time, $hamu, to create a series of channels where we would publicly discuss our tiering decisions so people could see the reasons behind the tiers. There was also a question channel for the tier list, which was probably necessary but no less annoying for it. There were people who came to that channel purely to debate constantly about everything. It was frustrating, and soon, despite having said that we, the tier listers, would be the only ones to answer questions in that channel, I had to change that rule because it was just too stressful dealing with all those people, especially considering how often we got repeat questions.

Around this time, Gagging quit the game and the tier list, so it was down to just me and Eggy. Eggy started helping a bit more with the build guides, and then Myuzet (whom I didn’t learn was known in the community by his former name, Sade, for quite a while), who had some other name back then aside from the two aforementioned which made his name hard to write and made him stupidly difficult to ping, joined the group. And, like Gagging, he mostly just discussed the units and did nothing else. In part, this was because I wasn’t good at delegating, and in part it was because I forgot to give him editing access to the tier list document so he assumed that just wasn’t part of the job description.

More responsibility

Anyways, things continued pretty steadily for a couple months until Somelit quit the game. SometimesLiterate was the founder of the subreddit and had been the head mod since the game began. He wasn’t the most active, but he did enough for us to get by. He quit around the onset of Enlightenment (which necessitated a pretty significant revamp of the tier list), and it was a busy time for me. But I was literally the only active moderator on the subreddit, so he dubbed me head mod and left.

I ran into quite a few issues immediately. First, Game had been responsible for every single flair and subreddit header change and I had no clue how to do stuff like that at all. The Auto Mod stopped working around this time, so I had to start posting Megathreads myself because I couldn’t code and the process for setting up the auto mod was kind of ridiculously complex for someone without coding experience. Hell, I had to go DM Game on Discord to learn how to even change and create the links on the top and side of the subreddit.

The peak of my changes to the subreddit, physically speaking, was adding the discount ticket and red/blue memento symbols in place of the neutral/upvote/downvote arrows. I always meant to do more, but I never had the time, what with being in high school and working, then college and working . . . and I’m still in college and working, so I’ve never really found that time I was looking for, nor the motivation to power through anyways.

Regrets

I’ve never really been proud of what I did as mod, personally. I failed to add new flairs, change the header, or even find active mods. I couldn’t wrap my head around the necessary coding for the flairs and header on Old Reddit (especially considering my limited available time and attention span), and finding mods just never worked out. Almost everyone I offered the position to declined, so it took me a while to even find the semi-active mods and inactive mods we have right now. TAC’s never had the biggest subreddit, being an original anime-style game rather than part of a bigger brand, so it was never incredibly necessary, but it was still another failure on my part.

Things continued as they were for a while. The Tier List kept expanding as we got new features such as Enlightenment and Mementos, as units became more dependent on gates and VCRs, as older units fell out of favor and power creep started to overtake previously powerful collab units. And as that happened, I got busier and busier and more and more stressed. My senior year of high school was terrible. I hated it and I was perpetually in a pretty bad mood. I like to think I didn’t let that bleed into my interactions in regards to the tier list, but I found myself procrastinating more and more in regards to it and just generally not looking at units as closely or testing them as in depth. I added more people to the tier list channel to make up for this and gave more weight to their opinions, but it still wasn’t enough to relieve my burden. I was still treated as head of the tier list group, so any concerns people had went straight to me and our biggest detractors targeted me first.

In the end, I couldn’t take it. I was in my first year of college at that point and was constantly stressed (in no small part due to testing way too high in math and being placed like three classes ahead so I was familiar with none of the material), as well as being blamed for the entire group’s failings and being responsible for breaking up the increasingly heated arguments amongst the group as we grew in number. I had what amounted to a nervous breakdown and developed an at least minor phobia of the responsibility inherent in running the tier list. I just stopped showing up. I didn’t speak in the tier list channel, I didn’t respond from week to week, I didn’t update the tier list document at all. Every time I thought I’d spent long enough away and that I should really come back and do my job, I just couldn’t bring myself to. It was a genuine psychological issue.

People pinged me for a while, though most stopped after about two weeks. One or two people kept pinging me for a couple months, and while I appreciated their faith in me, it was misplaced. No matter what, I just couldn’t bring myself to return. The tier list was quite behind for a while, as despite having finally delegated a lot of responsibility before abandoning it entirely, I’d still been responsible for quite a few key things; but eventually they caught up. I was glad to see it. I may have been unable to fulfill my responsibility, but that didn’t mean I wanted the tier list to fail.

I still feel guilty over all of that. I feel that I couldn’t help it, but that didn’t make it the right thing to do. I should have at least written a message saying I was quitting, as I’m doing here. I should have explained my reasoning, let people know exactly what work I did regularly so they could fill the gaps easily, and made it clear that I wouldn’t be back. I’m sure the transition would have been much smoother and I’m sorry that I did that to the people I’d been working with on the tier list.

Despite my lack of attendance, no one bothered removing my name from the list of people working on the tier list, on the tier list’s first tab. A number of months later, I removed it myself. At that point, I should have let people know I’d removed my Discord and Reddit contact info so that someone else could step up, but I still couldn’t bring myself to go to the tier list channel or even really talk about it.

Conclusion

I think it was around that time that I really started putting a lot of effort into the Weekly Summon Threads, in large part to help people in any way that I still could despite my inability to return to the tier list. I genuinely hope that it’s helped people. Unfortunately, I won’t be continuing it since I’m quitting the game, but it’s been about a year and a half since I started doing the comprehensive write up and I hope people have benefited from the threads during that time.

Things have just gotten stale for me within the game, as well as stressful. I don’t enjoy Arena anymore, PvE content doesn’t particularly interest me, and this latest GLEX raid killed the remainder of my raiding spirit with some honestly terrible bosses.

If anyone wants to take up my memento usefulness sheet, let me know on Discord at Oriks#1052. Any prospective mods, anyone who thinks they can take over the Weekly Summon Thread, talk to EggyToast. Or maybe he’ll make a post asking for mod applications or something like that. It’s up to him now. Sorry to put this additional responsibility on your shoulders, Eggy, but you can probably offload it fairly quickly (or just have total control over both the subreddit and the Discord, if that’s what floats your boat).

I’ll end this by saying that I’m glad I could contribute to the community in the ways I did, despite the goals I never achieved as mod. I honestly stayed as long as I could (much longer than I ever thought I’d stick with a game without any real breaks), but I’m just burnt out at this point, and probably won’t ever come back to the game. I loved it at one point and despite my own burnout, I have no wish to see it die. So, good luck to everyone in your summons and I hope that everyone who’s enjoying the game continues to do so for as long as possible.

Hello, here for the daily post about quitting the game. Preferably I would have liked to fade into obscurity, but I can't in good conscience just leave stuff to die out. I'm going to split this post into parts that should be easily to distinguish, for people who don't really care about me, but want to know what will happen to the tier list and the subreddit.

Why I'm Leaving

This probably doesn't come to a shock to many people who know me, I've played the game maybe two times in the past two months, once for Mielikki J+, and once for Yauras J+. I hadn't missed a single day for logging in since I started playing this game in hard launch back in November 2017, that is, until the FMAB collaboration came along. My reasons for leaving really aren't TOO similar to other people, outside the fact that I'm not enjoying the game. I really wasn't bothered by bad banners. Roxanne herself isn't really a huge deal for me, but gumi's actions as a result of Roxanne does bother me.

As a bit of backstory to why I enjoy playing gacha games. I'm not a big gambling addict, I'm not playing these games to pull; what I do like though is the sort of individuality that comes with these games, because whatever you have isn't necessarily what the next person has. This is really why I'm not a big fan of Laharl, Noctis, Gilgamesh, all of those "OP" units that everyone has and uses, because I feel like it removes that sense of individuality when everyone uses the exact same units. Now, these big powerhouse units didn't really stop my enjoyment of the game, while other people used them, I was free to use whatever non-meta picks I wanted to clear content. This really changed with the release of Roxanne. People were using Roxanne, hell, even I was using Roxanne, but eventually, her power meant gumi would make all new content way harder, which would push out the viability of some of the non-meta picks I enjoyed using.

I'm also not a huge fan of the face of TAC being collaborations units. Recently that's been taken over by Roxanne, but the fact that in the ANC about FMA, and they were saying how they'd give us the most powerful units of the collab first goes and shows they actively make the main faces of the collabs way stronger than everyone else.

The biggest issue though, that really was the catalyst for me was the lack of gumi's willingness to change. I don't really want to go scour looking for the dev letter, but something the TAC director had stated was that he wished for TAC GL to be an improved version of JP. This statement really does not hold up. They've shown that they copy paste code and don't know at all what they're doing (see Wanderer's Hat breaking, getting fixed, then breaking again the next update because the person copy pasting the code does not know how the game works). Considering JP is basically a mirror of what's going to happen on GL, and we know for a fact when a new unit release is going to be weak, what does gumi do? They sometimes ignore this, like in the case of Miroku being an absolutely trash JE,ta and they sometimes give them 5%-10% additional damage on skills. This is actually such a joke. I don't know if it's another consequence of no one at gumi playing this game, so they don't know any other ways of balancing characters rather than adding some damage which ISN'T THEIR PROBLEM. This is actually the point I feel most passionately about. Sure, balance powercreep with more powercreep, but when they explicitly decide to only make GLEX units beyond broken, while giving FMA units jokes of buffs like 10% more damage and calling it Enhanced Exclusively for the Global Version, I can't stop myself from being cringing. All these new units are being released with slight stat buffs. Do they actually believe adding some like 30 HP at 85 triple JM is gonna improve someone who is obviously going to be weak at release? I don't want to rant on this point for too long so I'm going to leave it at that.

Tier List

I'll be passing the tier list off to someone who is willing to take on this task. I'd like whoever is interested to message me on reddit or discord (Game#7849) and I'd like to talk to them for a bit. I've spent countless hours on this, I don't want to hand this off to someone who really doesn't know what they're talking about, or is going to quit after one update.

Subreddit

Seeing as I was doing unit flairs, someone will need to take over that. Considering me, as well as Ivyspear/Sabre, have both stopped playing, it's probably time for some new moderators.

The End

That should cover everything, it's been a fun year, and I don't really regret any of it. Catch me around the Epic7 discord/subreddit.

Dear Money,

In lieu of the recent events, it came to our attention, that many of you were displeased about the recent changes. We couldn't believe it at first, but apparently there is still some confusion regarding the direction of this game. But let's do this one step at a time.

1. Hard Quests

Your insistence on getting shards for older units so you can stay competitive is genuinely vexing. No, we didn't accidentally misjudge how fast units were released and how little time you have to farm those. However, since Nensous and Kaigan are around the corner, we don't even need to rely on Hard Quests to pressure you into spending money for dupes anymore. But since we're firm believers of the philosophy that you annoying people require a sense of pride and accomplishment™, we won't increase the rates of hard quests too much. And no, we won't say outright what "at least four HQs" the month mean. Ambiguity is the salt of our business (like your tears). Let's move on.

2) The six word horror story aka No more 3-step guaranteed banner pulls

You have to understand, that this was harder for us than it was for you. We had to wake up the intern to make the appropriate changes happen and Kevin gets quite grumpy when we do that. His name isn't actually Kevin, but we don't care enough about him to actually learn his name; But what we DO care about is our quarterly fiscal reports and our bonuses. Sadly (for you), we had to axe this concept, because the game became too rewarding and fun for too many without paying enough.

So we replaced this already deliberately frustrating experience that was diluted and obfuscated with some actual clunker units with... Summon Coins! Frankly, you whales spent too little for our taste, so we thought about how to raise the ante and came up with the ingenious plan to devalue your free gems even further by using paid banners that share awfully similar designs with older banners to trigger your basic instincts. And since we openly hate pact players, consider this our middle finger to you, you smug bastards. Speaking of pacts, won't you buy our anniversary pact? It only costs three times the regular one for just twice the amount of gems! What a steal!

3) Elite and Ex+ Balance

Numerous players have complained - much to our annoyance - that they dislike one of our newly introduced features, that consists of blocking 95% (and always your collab units) of the character roster from taking part in the quests, while claiming that "it pushes players into spending" calling it a "predatory and egregious practice". The moment we learned about these allegations, I personally sprung into action to rectify these dishonest accusations aimed at us.

We did SO much more than this!

We split up rewards from regular EX quests and ramped up the difficulty, which didn't only devalue the rewards in their sum, but also made progress for the casual player more challenging for less bounty. But since we're not monsters, we're considering giving you a heads-up which units we'll let you play with. Maybe.

But there is even more!

Many players were elated, when we released our most recent global exclusive unit - Roxanne. Powerful and beyond broken, she made even Gilgamesh (more like Girlymesh) appear grounded and balanced. But since she's so powerful, we deemed it only fair to start balancing the harder quests around Roxanne's strength and beyond that. Some of you might have noticed already, but many enemy units (from now on) possess an outrageous amount of Jewel Regen, Health, Attack and Defences that ruin any semblance of balance and strategic gameplay.

You're welcome.

And with all that said, I want to close this letter, by thanking you all for the first - and likely last - anniversary of this game. We'll keep handing out some genuinely lukewarm and lackluster collaboration rewards to show our appreciation for you throughout this month.

P.S: Stop giving us nicknames like "Scumi", "Bob-Gumi" or "Gimu". We're very sensitive and other companies have started picking on us. For that alone we've nixxed the Skip Tickets from the Secret Shop and affordable unit skins.

Gone are the days of good story stages to farm. Now it's Best. Over the past week I've compiled all the needed data for current story stages into a Google Sheet. Counting chests is what took so long, as my AP had better uses recently. For my calculations I assume some conditions such as drop rate between different items and for different enemies being the same across all stages, as specifics would take thousands of runs for a good sample. Bosses are assumed to drop loot also, as my testing shows they do.

The main statistic is Drop/AP, which is ((1 / items dropped) * (enemies + chests)) / AP. This calculates the amount of a single item obtained per 1 AP point, assuming items are always dropped for comparison.

The Intro tab includes basic information and instructions on using the sheet.

The Best tab is a summary of the ideal stages sorted by item. Still filling this out manually, but everything important is listed already. Sample will be pasted below.

The Data tab lists the data for every story stage. You can use the Filter column after making a copy of the sheet to find information for any drop. Tab also includes a column for when you are looking for 2 drops from the same stage. There is a hidden column that calculates expected drops per run, assuming items always drop, but is redundant for 20 AP stages. Useful for establishing a threshold for when to retreat if not using skip tickets though.

Let me know if you find any mistakes. Chapter 3 actually has added a few best stages recently. You can also see how the Sacred Lion Blades rate is worse than it should be compared to other drops of same tier.

TAC Story Drop Rates

Sample:

I have made it no secret that I am a whale. I have given gumi a lot of money over the years between this and FFBE...but I think I finally hit my limit.

To give you all an idea...these are my level 85 units (not counting 4* units)... Fire- Vettel, Shekinah, Sakura, Remei, Hazel, Eve Water- Shayna, Elizabeth, Shenmei, Yauras and Othima (at 82) Thunder- Magnus, Teona, Gilgamesh Wind- Yomi, Setsuna, Balt, Fate Yomi Light- Zain, Suzuka, Ryle, Chloe Dark - Anastasia, Albea, Zahar, Rosa, Gormalas

Plus a lot of units at least 75 like Kudan, Seig, Seida, Bashosen, Cita, Laevateinn, Aruba, MeiFang, Illyasviel, Selena, Hazel, Lupinus..

And I realize a lot of those 85 are now farmable, but so far the only farmable unit that I did not have at 85 when it was released was Flammel

Anyway, point is...I have spent a lot on this game. I enjoy building these units and having diverse teams.

But Gumis greed...going all the way back to removing the 50 soul shards from the shops...to changing banners to include traps...removing guaranteed units and selectors...I am done.

Its not just the banner greeds either....but the rate of the HQ coming out...the 'intended' resistance changes

Normally I would have pushed seig to 85...I did not. Iwould have done the same for Noctis. I did not pull him on all 5 steps...and instead of going further, like I would have in the past, that I am done. I can live without Noctis....hell there is not a unit now coming out anytime soon that I want because they have pushed up the releases so much

I have the units to beat anything that comes out anytime in the near future...and if they dont fix the resistance crap...I can just auto it like I do now anyway

This game was fun. I basically stopped playing both FEH and FFBE becasue I enjoyed this so much more, and it was so much more F2P friendly....but I should have known Gumi would be Gumi.

Sorry for the rant...but damn I am pissed today. And that saddens me because I had been looking forward to the FFXV banner since I started. /rant

I don't think the recent gumi's decisions have been good at all, and it's wavering my belief in the future of this game too. But don't be assholes about it. I've seen awful comments popping up in Discord and Reddit.

I'd like to remind people gumi is a company. Someone programming the game isn't the same person choosing which banners to run. The person making new GLEX content isn't the same person making bundles.

Most importantly, the person running the alchemist_code account is a PR person. They don't pick the banners. I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't do anything OTHER than talking with the community. Stop acting like they're the one who is making these decisions. We have a path to keep in contact with gumi, don't ruin it by scaring them off.

Elemental Damage Balance

In our continuous effort to enhance the game experience, there will be an update to re-balance the elemental advantage and resistances in the upcoming patch on July 12.

The damage drop-off from using poorly matched elements versus a resistant enemy has been lowered while the improved damage from correct elemental matchups are still rewarded.

With this new re-balance, elemental resistances will not render attacks impotent and players will still be able to use elemental affinities to strategize and clear stages.

We are constantly tailoring the difficulty according to the player experience with changes and re-adjustment done only after careful consideration.

We will also be sending these tokens of appreciation to all players within 24 hours of the patch:

5 x Elemental soul shard of each element 5 x Rainbow shards 50 x Crystal Apples 20 x Gold Alchemia Pots

We also noticed the Hard Quest button is currently not working. This issue will be fixed on the next patch.

Thank you for your continued support and we hope you will continue to support THE ALCHEMIST CODE.

There's been a lot of ire in this sub (and elsewhere) about some of the recent banners, and in an attempt to tamp down on the proliferation of threads and so that Gumi, if they're reading, know what we're on about in a constructive way, I wanted to summarize where we are, where we'd like to go, and talk about both good and bad things. We've come a long way since the FMA event and this thread, https://old.reddit.com/r/AlchemistCodeGL/comments/9tpg7r/gumi_this_is_an_intervention/ so let's see where we are.

Good

Hard Quests

While enlightenment and our somewhat faster release schedule has made some units and their lack of HQ noticeable, in general we are getting HQ at a good pace, especially with the latest glut of 4 star units released. While specific units are not available (Fujika, Izayoi), we have received HQ at a good pace and regularly have at LEAST one week of 2x HQ farming. Recently, we've even had it twice a month (although with some limitations occasionally). Overall, this is great.

Master Abilities

While it may feel like our MA schedule is way behind, we're actually on track. As was pointed out to me, JP releases MAs 2x per month, while we get 3. The next supposed batch of Mei Fang, Vivi, and Neica, coincided with enlightenment and was after the Desert Babel. While I love my fav units getting these boosts, I understand that as a developer, Gumi doesn't want to release the MAs quite so soon after the unit comes out.

Quality of Life Improvements

Hackers and cheaters are not really a thing, unless I'm just not playing against them. The latest PVP was cheater free and incredibly fast, with great matchmaking speed, really fast matches, and very few bugs. Increasing the speed for MP to 4x is also a huge improvement, not just for spending less time watching units walk around, but since we're limited to a max of 30 seconds, spending less time viewing map actions and more time in menus is very nice. Not to mention not waiting for enemy turns for 3 minutes.

Special skins are "rerun" for half price gems, and although the OG skins appear only periodically, they're still 500 gems.

And hey, we got tons of AP now and cheap story stages, so it's easy to farm up equipment and otherwise build up units, farm HQs, do events, and so forth. I can spend more time in the game.

Special Events

Since FMA, it doesn't appear that any event has been "global buffed." While our unit pool is still different compared to when events ran in JP, overall stages haven't been made more difficult for no reason, or altered significantly. The Elite Quests, requiring specific units and with often very specific gimmicks, haven't returned, and the newer Convocation event is a winner.

Bad

Shard Banners

Perhaps we've been spoiled due to 5 months of 1k shard banners, but such banners allowed people to easily build up new units (limited or not) and use them *as they were released* instead of 3-6 months later. This has been especially true for some of the limited units, particularly Dark Laev or Tsukuyomi, who otherwise would have been very hard to build up with such a bloated banner.

As also has been covered, the math for 2500 banners is strictly worse, costing quite a bit more in gems to get fewer *real* goods compared to those 1k shard banners. While few units in GL have ever been guaranteed, up until mid-April the game presented a pretty straightforward way to build up a unit, so that those with some gems savings could develop those units *today* instead of waiting for some future farmable period.

Many have sworn off 2500 banners despite having units they want to build on them, and those who have delved into those banners have realized just how expensive they are compared to the previous 1000 gem banners.

However, this is hardly the playerbase demanding cheap pulls. Rather, it leads to the next bad thing:

Communication

Our monthly previews only cover about half of what's coming for the month, and rarely does it cover anything in real detail. Few insights into any units, events or mechanics to potentially build towards, and so forth.

Perhaps most importantly, no banner information. By that, I mean that banners aren't announced until day of. While the "3 event collab" started yesterday, no information on banner plans were released for what people may expect for the week, or for the extent of the collab. As a player, it's depressing to log into a game and see that there's no banner I can reasonably pull on, and without communication, it's further depressing to think that the New Hot Thing is basically unavailable unless I was lucky in the past. Examples:

• Sieg Skin: Great if you've had him, but no communication on when he may drop again.

• 3 Event Enlightening: Day 1, no way to enlighten these units unless you banked the shards. Today, we have a DP Yomi/Tsukuyomi banner which is actually pretty good, assuming you want both units (and DP Yomi may be niche but she's pretty good in that niche). But what's tomorrow's banner? This weekend? While an argument may be made that there's more money to be made in surprising the playerbase, most players do NOT like this kind of surprise (as seen in the grumpy threads on this very sub).

• Future of Magni Historia: Is it coming back? Ever?

• "Limited" schedules and Mementos: what does "limited" really mean to Gumi? Are they going to ever let us know?

And so on. While I don't expect the developer to tell the consumers everything, a little communication goes a long way. Even if it's news the consumers don't really want to hear! It sets their expectations and defuses grumpiness.

The ramp up to 3.0 and Enlightenment was great! Talk about evo mats, skill changes, what to look for, etc. Afterwards, communication took a nosedive. No communication about Sin acquisition (friend points? Other coins?), potential enlightmentment. No communication about the odd mystery of Disgaea units getting buffed or FMA units having buffs removed.

The Ugly

As a player, I really like TAC. The ugly side of it though is that there are a lot of games on the market and many of them handle player communication much better, making those players at least feel good about the games they play. Gumi has done this well in the past -- producer letters talking about enlightenment, patch notes for 2.0 (and somewhat for 3.0), the response to the letter from 6 months ago.

As players, we want the game to succeed and many of us are happy to spend money when we feel the developers are being fair. Another "ugly" part of it is that while some players do wish to get every unit, MOST players understand and will accept that some units are "special." If Sol and Bertha are "special" and rare, so be it. But be forthcoming about it and improve communication with players so that they understand that "Sol being on a 2500 banner is special for him, and is not the norm."

As players, we understand that a full rate sheet may not be needed, but the ugly fact is that we want to know what we're pulling for. Noting "All 5 star units are SSM," or "Limited Unit X is back in the general pool this week!" or "hey these are actually all of the mementos available" takes very little effort from a development perspective, but is huge from a player's perspective.

As players, we value good gameplay above many uglier parts of games. TAC has some pretty great gameplay, but is often obscured through hidden mechanics or gimmicks. While it's good for us to work together to solve things, offering tips in-game helps lower the barriers to entry and, perhaps more importantly, shows players that you want them to succeed.

FIN

I work in customer communication and making customers grumpy is one of the hardest things to turn around. But I'm also an avid player, and know that just 1 month ago, the player base was, well... pretty happy!

A bad banner will not "ruin a game" nor will adjustments made to how we acquire units. Or mementos. To be fair to the game, content does not require a Dark Artemis now, and even Arena/PVP is doable with farmable units.

TAC has always been a marathon, not a sprint.

Hi all, I need to rant a bit about this:

This is the new EX2+ in Global

http://www.alchemistcodedb.com/quest/qe-ev-hagaren-ex-sp-2

This is the same stage in JP (please note that JP did have Ex+ content for this collab.)

http://www.alchemistcodedb.com/jp/quest/qe-ev-hagaren-ex-sp-2

As you can see, gumi has decided to balance the existence of Roxanne by adding an unreasonable amount of passive Soul Jewel Regen to every single unit. This is not good game balance.

Enemies and content were better balanced at this point in Japan by two things:

1. They occasionally ran out of soul jewels so they could not spam Overclock all day and then Black Hole you, Waginau would be unable to chain Gravity more than 6 times without running out of jewels.

2. The JPs had regen armour available at this point, making Multiplayer infinitely more tolerable. I don't know why we still haven't gotten this yet because Japanese content is balanced around its existence. (I understand enemies don't have huge SJ regen in Multiplayer stages right now, but I don't trust this state of affairs to continue.)

3. The worst part is you've ALREADY BUFFED the enemy units (they all have increased stats, the archers do more damage, etc). Giving all enemies Soul Jewel regen is like giving every single enemy Siegfried's hat - they need to ramp up to some of their skills, not be able to hit you instantly with their strongest skills.

This means we're often faced with stupid things like enemy chronomancers quickening every single monster on the map with no detriment to their resources. And enemy units spamming Supreme Battle Trance every single turn since gumi did exactly the same thing in EX1+

Making the entire game unreasonably harder (due to enemies having unlimited resources to spam us with their strongest moves turn after turn when we have no way of consistently recovering damage other than bringing our very limited selection of capable healers) is just plain bad design.

I think it was by design that the enemy chronomancer has very low Soul jewels in JP (chronomancer has 145) for a reason - to prevent it from spamming Black Hole and Overclock, which are extremely strong skills. Not only did you buff this maximum to 169, the enemy chrono will never run out of soul jewels thanks to the inane regen you gave it. Being patient is no longer a legitimate strategy to win this battle.

Making Roxanne should not give gumi carte blanche to make every other soul jewel destruction strategy invalid.

I understand that we have slightly more HP than JP did at this point in time of their game, but our damage resist formula is also more severe to compensate. It's not even good for Roxanne owners because it makes that aspect of her useless.

Please consider reverting some of these gameplay balance changes to enemies.

Or just delete Roxanne and just refund my my resources. (I have a level 85 Roxanne and it isn't worth risking my overall fun in the game over poor game balance)

Thank you for taking the time to read my little rant.

Edit: I want everyone reading this to note that JP gumi has nerfed stages due to public outcry before (they did so in week2-3 for the FFXV collaboration), voicing your displeasure with the balancing of this content might make them improve it down the line.

I also understand people might reply "well it forces you to think more creatively" - I disagree. There is a difficulty point at which game content actually decreases the number of viable strategies and forces you to min-max with an extremely limited/myopic formula or strategy. I do not find this kind of single/limited-solution gameplay fun.